Massif

I have known Garth Nix for a long time. His career was just starting up when I lived in Melbourne, and I reviewed Sabriel in Emerald City #12. Of course that had little, if anything, to do with the book’s success, but it is nice to see someone you know go from a relative unknown to an international superstar.

Most of Nix’s work has been aimed at the children’s or YA markets, but Massif is something of a departure, being a book intended primarily for adults. I’m sure that YA readers could read and enjoy it too, though they may be a little bored with the pace, but the book is technically Cosmic Horror.

It could also easily be categorised as military SF. The book is centred around the crew of a military spacecraft called Sassafras, particularly Captain Parnell. It is clear from the outset that Nix has some experience of military life, and this is confirmed in the Acknowledgements.

One of the things that characterises life in the military is that it comprises short periods of absolute terror punctuated by long periods of deadly boredom. Other standard cliches are incompetent commanders and corrupt quartermasters. Nix has all of these. Being in the military can also be a bureaucratic nightmare.

But what is the war, you ask? Well, time for some worldbuilding.

I the recent past of the novel, a mountain range took off from Earth. It was not Uluru, even though that does look very much like it ought to be able to take off. The mountain range in question was the Marojejy massif in Madagascar. That’s bigger, spiker, and importantly not sacred to any indigenous people. It is home to the Silky Sifaka, a ridiculously cute and extremely rare type of lemur, but hopefully the aliens save them.

Or should I say alien. It turns out that the galaxy is full of space-travelling mountain ranges. Each one is inhabited a single, eccentric alien known as the Avatar, and by large numbers of tentacled horrors. The Avatars seem friendly to humans, giving us spacecraft and refusing to allow us to harm each other while aboard a massif. They also take us to habitable worlds and allow us to colonise them.

But, and this is a big but, there are two competing political groupings in the solar system: Earth and Mars. They have very different social philosophies, and they are at war. The Avatars are perfectly happy for deadly combat to happen, as long as it is not on a massif. So typically each massif is home to rival military bases that send missions to fight over the colony worlds.

You can almost imagine the aliens tapping their heads and saying, “these humans are crazy.”

As the story opens, Parnell and his crew are part of a military action against the Martians based on their massif. The Earth commander is an idiot who would not be out of place in WWI (presumably at Gallipoli rather than the Somme—Australians remember such things). As part of that action, their fighter pilot, Kaz, takes damage to her craft and has to make an emergency landing on the planet. Much of the rest of the story is ostensibly about Parnell and the crew of the Sassafras trying to launch a rescue mission, but it is actually about them finding out the truth about the massifs and their alien avatars.

Seriously, never trust aliens bearing gifts.

As I noted earlier, Massif does proceed quite slowly, but that is entirely appropriate to a horror story. When the bad stuff happens, well, did I mention tentacled horrors?

Title: Massif
By: Garth Nix
Publisher: Harper Collins
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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